THERE’S more turnover at the top of Richard Desmond‘s embattled celebrity weekly OK!, which is getting its fourth top editor in a year.
Mark Pasetsky, who has been appearing every Monday to consult on the all-important cover selection, is going to be installed as the editor.
His formal title apparently hasn’t been hammered out yet, but he’ll replace Sarah Ivens, the launch editor who was recalled from her old Kentucky home earlier this year and reinstated as editorial director when several earlier editing picks did not work out.
She clearly didn’t want to be in New York City and tried to do as much as she could remotely. Ivens, who launched the magazine in 2005, got married in September 2008 and moved to Kentucky.
She kept ties to the magazine, but day-to-day management was handed off, first to ex-Rosie editor Susan Toepfer, then to former copy editor Katie Caperton, who shared power with Creative Director Jason Oliver Nixon. All were bounced by Desmond when newsstand sales did not break out of their slump.
The magazine lost $23.4 million in 2008. A spokesman insisted it has been profitable in recent months.
“Sarah is back to her position as editor-at-large, which is the position she was originally intended for after resigning as editor-in-chief at the end of 2008,” he said.
Pasetsky had been a public relations man at Bauer Publications, until he was tapped to be the editor of Life & Style. When that gig ended, he started the Web site CoverAwards, which critiques the covers of celeb weeklies.
Next week OK! will feature exclusive photos from Khloe Kardashian‘s wedding. The magazine is said to have paid $300,000.
Desmond is said to have been infuriated that Kardashian talked to this week’s issue of Life & Style before the photos ran in OK!.
Tad’s stakes
The resignation of Newsday Publisher Tim Knight has put former Reed Business CEO Tad Smith back in the spotlight in his new post at Cablevision.
Smith last month was named president of Cablevision’s newly created Local Media Group, overseeing the Newsday Media Group, News 12 Networks and MSG Varsity, a Long Island high school sports news service that launched yesterday.
And with Knight’s abrupt resignation Wednesday, Smith finds himself having to find a permanent Newsday publisher while also fulfilling a long-term company goal of stitching together a sweeping Web strategy for Ca blevision’s local- news as sets.
Sources said it ap peared that Knight left the paper on his own, possibly after he chafed at the new world order under Smith. He was replaced on an interim basis by Terry Jime nez, a former Newsday CFO who was most re cently publisher of freebie amNew York.
Smith left Reed Business, owner of Variety, Publishers Weekly and other business trades, shortly after its parent company, Reed Elsevier, unveiled plans to sell off a big portion of the company.
He started at Cablevision on Sept. 1 and is currently engaged in a “top to bottom review” of Newsday and News 12, according to one knowledgeable source.
No one knows what changes Smith will orchestrate, but when Cablevision purchased the newspaper in August 2008 from real estate mogul Sam Zell, the company hoped to create synergies between the paper and its cable operations.
However, so far, there have been few linkups between the two camps on either the advertising or editorial fronts.
When reached by Media Ink yesterday, Smith declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Debby Krenek, who has spent the past decade as an editor near the top of Newsday’s masthead, has been quietly named senior vice president of digital media at the newspaper.
The promotion comes as Newsday has struggled with a decline in Web traffic since its Web site got a makeover in July. According to Web-tracking service comScore, Newsday.com saw the number of unique visitors fall 27 percent in August to 1.75 million from 2.05 million the previous month.
Zelnick’s in
ZelnickMedia, the investment firm run by Strauss Zelnick, hasn’t abandoned its hope of buying BusinessWeek from McGraw-Hill Cos.
According to BusinessWeek, reporting on its own auction process, Zelnick is consulting with former Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz as it puts together a bid.
Zelnick Media owns everything from Time-Life Music to Lillian Vernon to Take-Two Interactive, publisher of videogame “Grand Theft Auto,” and is famous for paying low on properties with strong brand identity.
“As far as I had heard they are not in it,” said one source, who said the company has yet to submit a bid.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg‘s media and information company, Bloomberg LP, continues to be regarded as the frontrunner.
Crovitz is teaming up with Steve Brill and former cable executive Leo Hindery to start Journalism Online, a system that will get people to pay for Web content from newspapers and magazines.
Hindery is said to have also taken an early look at BusinessWeek, but passed on it.
Doggone
Vanity Fair writer Nina Munk is folding Urbanhound.com, her Web site dedicated to city dogs, after a 10-year run.
“It just shows you how lousy journalists are at running businesses,” Munk told Media Ink.
“It’s been 10 years since Urbanhound’s launch, and though we accomplished so much, we never did figure out how to make money . . . so we’re folding our tent and moving on,” she wrote in an e-mail to friends yesterday.
Fortunately, she never did quit her day job, and an article on Jeffrey Sachs in VF’s Africa issue two years ago netted her a book deal with Doubleday. The book is due sometime next year, and has the working title, “Bending History.”
Rush job
“The Greatest Trade Ever,” the upcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman about billionaire hedge fund king John Paulson, is being rushed to bookstores on Nov. 3.
The book, about the Wall Street contrarian who made more than $20 billion by betting against conventional wisdom during the financial crisis, was originally slated for February, but is now coming out earlier — the result of a contrarian decision by Broadway Business, a unit of Random House Inc.
“There’s a lot of books out there on the melt down of the economy, but not that much on the peo ple who benefited from it,” said Roger Scholl, ed itorial director of Broad way Business, who said booksellers were clamoring for it.
Paulson was an overlooked hedge-fund manager until 2007, when he racked up $15 billion in profits by betting against risky subprime mortgages. In 2008 and early 2009, he wagered against financial companies and scored another $5 billion.
He is now being described as the “new Warren Buffett.” Zuckerman is said to have snagged an advance of about $250,000 for the book, which draws on more than 50 hours of interviews with Paulson.
New job
Chris Allen, who spent 17 years at Time Inc., where he steered Cooking Light to fame and fortune, started last week at Hearst as the publisher of Country Living.
He’s teaming up with Sarah Gray Miller, who was tapped as the new editor-in-chief in November.